


Open Into Wonder

by Alias (anafabula)



Category: Cultist Simulator (Video Game)
Genre: Banned Together Bingo 2020, Blasphemy, Canon-Typical Protagonist Gender Ambiguity, Fictional Religion & Theology, Gen, Inaccurate Catholicism, Knock is the principle which opens and is opened, Poisoning (Discussed), The Mother of Ants, The Suppression Bureau (Cultist Simulator), Threshold Victory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:08:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24443347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: The detective who I assume has been assigned to me asked to meet on neutral ground; in public, and under a transparently false name, but both of those choices are prudent enough.And I still welcome such a chance for conversation. I think.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 14
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	Open Into Wonder

**Author's Note:**

> The Mother of Ants is also called the Daughter of Venoms, for the association with snakes that infiltrate and toxins that open.
> 
> Prompt: `“Jesus Christ”`. With the quotes.

The detective does not ask to meet me at my church and I do not offer. My hospitality could be generous; my hospitality is a threat. I am aware now, I think, of how outsiders view us; I have grown aware the harder way. 

I meet her in the city, my own obligations dispensed with for the day, a relatively benign sermon leaving few reasons for further discussion or follow-up. Everyone needs a rest, sometimes.

She wraps both hands around her teacup and smiles when she sees me, the image of a young woman under-dressed for the weather and slightly nervous of an acquaintance she only slightly remembers. It shows, in other words, that in other lives she’s been a capable enough spy.

(It surprises me, not as a novelty and not for the first time, that she did not even try to investigate us from within my congregation. One would think it an easy vulnerability. Does the Bureau forbid even that level of contact with the true thoughts of another soul? But then why opt for this meeting to speak to me?)

The chill is nontrivial in no small part because we are in public, by now naturally found too in the murmur of disquiet of those other than her whose eyes are drawn to me; and I walk slowly as well, which could hardly help but can’t be helped, still growing accustomed to the newest bone-deep ache of what is asked by proximity to the Glory settling uneasy within me. It gives them all more than space enough for staring. If my detective is unnerved as well by my presence — as she almost definitely is — she has far greater control; it doesn’t show.

It's strange to know this: that the hands that ache to pull out the chair opposite her could kill as well, could kill her with this casual of discomfort if not ease that’s outright greater. I am capable of a great many individual acts, more outside the realm of human than not. It is the interstitial performance of a simple mortality that more and more eludes me.

When she speaks, when she thanks me for meeting with her in a tone that does not match her words, she lowers her cup but does not set it down. If I had arrived before her (and surely she could expect that I wouldn’t), yes, I may have poisoned her trivially enough, I suppose; perhaps she knows as well as I do that it would be a holy act, at that.

There are pleasantries — I could; I could, I think, easily and with the sacred joy of it; but I won’t — and then unpleasantries, in short enough order. Perhaps it is a trap for her to ask me questions about theology, it’s a better way than most to make me court Suppression of my own free will with every breath, but neither can I let myself countenance her ignorance as revealed to me.

She asks — such a question as to make me think for a moment that I’ve misheard — how I justify belief in alien gods over our Savior; it takes a long second to marshal my own response, so comfortable am I in my habits talking to believers.

It would be like denying my belief to the seasons, I tell her, gently.

(There is one word of truth I could offer, could have offered, and end the conversation entirely. I don’t; I mustn’t, I think.)

It is not an act of reverence toward anything but our own Creator to know and marvel at the world; even at its most secretive, at its most complex. Willful ignorance could not be holy, or desirable in His eyes, if His own Son ascended under the aegis of that aspect which brooks no ignorance, if He bled for the supervening power of what is real and cannot in its transcendence be denied. After all, I say. Even her masters seem to admit to the existence of the Mansus, of the lesser Principles and the one that opens us to Salvation as if the Mother held the knife, when it’s convenient that they do. It’s just they deny themselves, after; isn’t that why she’s only offered me false names, for knowledge of the clear and ever-present threat she will be censured for the same curiosity that drives her hunt of me, and without warning?

And it does take her a moment to respond to that. She’s holding her cup all the while, just above the table as if touching something I can touch is dangerous, though it has ceased to steam altogether; and with that I can hardly be blamed for the turn of my thoughts toward the Mother not as giver of salvation and reckoner of insight but in her guise as the Daughter of Venoms, the holy material form as opposed to the holiness of fracture or absence. For a moment. Only a moment.

It is habit from other targets she has known, I assume, that makes her ask almost conspiratorially about temptation, about whether I have considered such exaltation for myself, as if she expects that the shock of a sympathetic ear will make me tell her yes. It doesn’t, and it won’t; I have been tempted by many things in my life — as any human can — but that is not one of them. Yes, I tell her, I am a follower of Christ, but that could hardly mean I would ever leave my own flock behind.

But — here I don’t remember her exact phrasing, to my own mild consternation — had I not, was what she got across, but more in the Bureau’s confused way — had I not claimed I sought salvation in another; and here it occurs to me I’m incriminating myself beyond all doubt, yes, but my own vulnerability to mortal authorities is a distant secondary concern before the obligation of what Opens against the safety known as ignorance. If I did not explain such a thing when asked in what may well be good faith I would not deserve to grasp those mysteries she sees me as tainted with in the first place.

So I do tell her that the contradiction she seeks doesn’t, couldn’t, ever exist, when the aspect of the Mother is how Christ brought His salvation. For the Mother of Salvation to be in conflict with His holy gift to humanity would require that the gift itself, of all that we find is the Lord, were not possessed of such overwhelming power for its expression through the Principle before which all others bow.

Surely we see this with Saint Agnes, I say, and to my regret I allow myself to grow somewhat terse at this. A patron of hospitals, in icons, with her many hands and wise and severed heads with the Glory after death that merits canonization, all of these _being_ things we understand — the Bureau is hardly harassing every innocent who believes in the saints as being somehow Unchristian, I hope. If nothing else, even aside from that authority being entirely out of the question of earthly law, I can’t imagine they have the manpower.

No, she says, not just for that; they are not unreasonable, she says (this being news to me), in such a way as to imply I’m right to say what stops such as her is mere logistical concern. Not for such private practice, not at all; more if someone were to advance themselves as a Second Coming—

Which I am not. Which I could never be worthy of imagining. I do right by what I am given but I am only human and to claim otherwise would be obscene.

But the wounds, she says, which fills my quiet with a cold and roiling dread. She sits her cold tea down to gesture with clarification I do not need.

And I thought of poisoning, of course, for venom and revelation are holy; there is a precious vial under my coat and over my breast, colder than blood nonetheless, and the Daughter would look kindly on the tableau of its mouth raised to the Detective’s parted lips and my hand on the back of her skull for support.

Knock opens; the eye, the ear, but the mouth which resists as well. I know the effects of that holy liquid I carry; and, while the detective is relatively young, I can only imagine how eventful her life to date has been. For the inevitability of snakes and the brink of the Mother’s fingers to open every wound she’s ever suffered, visible and unseen, scarred or healed past scarring, at once, and all of them alive to impart the lessons of the memory that left them; it would be a sight, indeed, and one Saint Agnes might smile on.

I do not tell her the most fundamental difference, more than what happened after, more than His life and ministry besides the opening to the House; which is that those seven wounds from which He shed His holy blood, for all mine may approach them in truth and form, were such that His revelations through the Mansus _would_ cast the light and essence of the Salvation we now know through Him across all Histories, something I can scarcely imagine.

If I am lucky as well as, in being, righteous and good, I may become a threshold, for those willing to follow me, in this History, and even that will be a miraculous achievement. The urgency of the nature of the Secret Histories, here, becomes enough to stay my tongue even before the image of the principle of opening, and I tell her none of this, or very little.

It pains me, slightly, on principle, that there is no way I could ever see my way now to assuring her there will be space enough for her just on a human level come the next Mass, for all her maybe-earnest interest and my sense of the inevitability that she’s known where to find me for longer than I’ve known of her observation. That if she asked I would have to find the words that would let me say no.

(There are rumors, about sanctuary laws, and the customs of the Suppression Bureau. For there to be more than rumors, their investigations’ outcomes would have to first be knowable at all.)

She does not ask, as our conversation ends. No. She says, now mournfully earnest, that regardless of whether she sees or believes in the sorts of dreams we both know and for which she hunts down innocents for secret trials, that the world is too important for that to matter to her life.

The irony behind our every exchange being, of course, how I would think that I agree with her. It’s in recognition of this that I further gentle my voice to ask if she means this as concern for others. It has not escaped my notice how much all Long seem to leave behind, and none of it a record of whether doing so had pained or almost stayed them.

To others, she tells me, the perfect public servant for a moment, a seamless mask, until she adds: and to herself.

I know we are irreconcilable, and that I can only wonder at what she had hoped here to achieve, and that I border on repeating myself. But the river ran clear today and the wind is brisk and striking and I am overwhelmed by how the beauty of the mundanities of Creation are inseparable from that of the transcendence of the Glory in any more than proximity and degree, how the universal wonder of this existence calls me on when I might hesitate, all as seamless as the lack of difference in the exaltation of my scarring between ecstasy and ache.

It pains me to know she denies herself all of this life that matters but deliberately, and I find I still must reiterate: denying the greatness of all that exists in its entirety is hardly a way to live in the world.

She arrived before me and departs before me as well; it seems to make her comfortable, so I’m happy enough to allow it.

Especially when we won’t meet again, I think; or not in this form, or never in such a way as to be able to speak freely. If it was to be a singular opportunity I hope she doesn’t feel she’s wasted it. For I don’t wish her ill, I really don’t, even if the life she leads all but guarantees that she herself might.

**Author's Note:**

> Jesus “literally, Jesus Christ, as in I had to get help with the Christianity levels for this fic” Christ was, in-game, canonically, once a Knock-Long; and I just think that’s _beautiful._


End file.
